I don’t care too much about price in itself. And let’s be real, Nintendo’s pricing is cheaper than dirt (literally, I pay more for garden soil on a yearly basis than I do Nintendo online services). The price of four to five years of Nintendo online services multi-user plan is less than I pay taking my family out to dinner on an average night out.
Time is my main consideration. If it’s something I want, I’ll pay for it. I generally look at games the same way I look at other entertainment. I give myself a budget of up to 70 €/£/$ per week, or 10 a day. This includes factoring new hardware and software, so if I pay 600 for new hardware and games, I better be getting 2 months out of that alone - that’s in total - not stacked together. Switch + Breath of the Wild brought me hundreds of hours of play very quickly, so that alone justified my purchase of a Switch, and then games like Witcher 3, Mario Kart 8D, and others have added hundreds more hours… meaning the Switch is a lot of bang for the buck entertainment, much like the Wii and DS Lite. I rarely find much dilemma in purchasing new Nintendo hardware :)
Something else I’ll note, if I’m buying it for myself, likely others in my family are taking advantage of it, so that also increases its value to me as what benefits my family benefits my interests.
Into services: if it’s something I’ll play three to five times a month, then 10 a month is a fair price... five to ten is 20 a month, something like every day even up to 50.
Right now, I don’t think that will be the case. Nintendo’s current track record of getting new content to their services is not very good. I’m going to want 2+ new games per week… or 5+ new games if they’re stuff like Shadows of the Empire and stuff I’d probably only play an hour or two at most. Now, if they brought out games like Goldeneye and Banjo Kazooie, I wouldn’t give a crap what else they released that month :D
But games like that are really limited on the current platform selection… unless SNES and NES get pulled into the premium package, too!
Example; bring on the SNES RPGs! Maybe drop Earthbound and/or Mario RPG on their basic service since they’re first party, and then shell out to get Chrono Trigger, FF4, 6, Illusion of Time, Terranigma, and (dare I dream?) Fire Emblem 4 on the premium at around the same time… basically using Earthbound and/or Mario RPG as a gateway to an upsell of the premium service during the month of RPGs. That’s just good business… but a bit aside the point since this is about what I think the service would be worth.
A more relevant example: I’d pay no less than 25 per month if the service offered every (within reason due to licensing) SNES game, every Mega Drive game, every NES game, and every N64 game. That would be something I could play almost indefinitely for many hours a month for years on end.
Want a never ending stream of content? Let indie devs have their own corner of a subscription platform on the Switch online premium service, pay them based on downloads and impression… Track impressions based on offline play as well by updating the database at each new online connection.
So, to answer the question. I’m not sure how much I want to pay at this point, it could be as low as 5 per year, or as high as 25 per month (50 if they do the indie idea). It really depends on how often I’d be using it… that depends on the cadence and quality of content release.
Nintendo really should do a direct with comprehensive plans for the service. Personally speaking, they need to demonstrate the value than a few N64 and Sega games that are widely available (plus Winback)… Personally speaking, they need to show that it’s something I’m going to want to play every month for hours; otherwise, I have other games to play.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
